It Could Happen Here - Neoliberalism Part 1: The Avengers of Taking Food From Babies

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Mia takes us through the invention of Neoliberalism, the founding of the the Mont Pèlerin Society, and how the three major schools of neoliberalism were united through their hatred of democracy and their love of Rhodesia   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how society is falling apart, and about how to put it back together again. I'm your host Christopher Wong, and today, and for the next few days,

we're doing something a bit different. We're going to take a deep dive into some of the people who got us into the mess we're in today. Now, when we've talked about our enemies and it could happen here, we've mostly focused on fascism, and for good reason. But for the next few days, we're focusing on a different enemy, though don't worry, the Nazis will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the single most successful political movement of the 20th and 21st centuries. No other political movement in human history has directly controlled so much of the globe. It has outmaneuvered, outlasted, or simply destroyed every ideology that sought to oppose it, and has reigned virtually unchallenged for 50 years,

after it exploded onto the political scene in Chile. Their victory has been so total that even the erstwhile opponents have adopted its core principles. Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her proudest accomplishment was creating Tony Blair, basking in the irony that neoliberalism would be implemented across the globe in large part by labor and socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist countries maintain so-called special economic zones, with the laws of neoliberalism are allowed to run rampant in exchange for GDP increases, and their communist supporters in the West have come to believe that capitalism is a far more powerful engine of economic development than the state planning advocated by their forebearers, thus internalizing the greatest principle of neoliberalism even as they claim to oppose it. All of this, of course, raises two questions. What actually is neoliberalism, and how did it come to rule the world?

Today, we're going to try to answer the first question by looking back at the original neoliberals and examining what they believed, because it's not what you think. There are many places you can begin the story of neoliberalism. I'm choosing to start in France in 1938. Now, the 1930s are a bad time to be a free trade market liberal. And just to clear this up early, liberal in the European context, which is where a lot of the beginning of the story takes place, does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context. which is where a lot of the beginning of the story takes place, does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context. European liberalism up to this point is about free trade, markets, individual liberty and rights, etc, etc, but it's anti-state interference.

To be somewhat reductive, it's kind of closer to what conservatism is in the US, but it's not identical. So bear that in mind as the story goes on. 1930s saw the rise of fascism, social democracy, and communism, each with its own form of government spending and economic planning, which liberals absolutely detested. Now, the 1920s and 30s have been full of liberals gathering to try to figure out what to do next. And in 1937, Walter Lippmann, an American writer who would become most famous for inventing the term Cold War, wrote a book called An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society,

which argued that totalitarianism is a product of not having individual private property, and that the state needs to be limited to administering justice and not, you know, giving people things that they need. And so a lot of liberals read this and go, oh cool, we should organize a conference to talk about this book and our ideas. And the product is a 1938 Litman Colloquium. Now, a bunch of extremely important neoliberals show up at this conference, including one Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow. And they start talking about the need for a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Keynesianism, fascism, and what they call Manchester laissez-faire liberalism, in which the state

didn't intervene at all in political life and let the economy run on autopilot. Now, the German sociologist Alexander Rousseau, who we're going to talk about more in a second, comes up with the term neoliberalism to define the new set of principles that they're trying to develop. And they think the new liberalism should prioritize the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system of competition, and importantly, a strong and impartial state. Now, this is the origin of neoliberalism as a term. And it's important to understand two things from the outset, because the neoliberals are going to spend the next 50 years lying about this. One, neoliberalism favors a strong state to make the market work. And two, neoliberalism is not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now, neoliberals essentially invented the whole I'm a classical liberal thing in the 50s. But if you read the

original stuff that they wrote, if you go back to 1940s, if you go back to 1930s and you read what they write, the neoliberals are extremely clear that they are not classical liberals and that, in fact, their political project is different from the 20th century and 19th century liberal project in which the state is supposed to be a night watchman and not actually interfere in the markets at all. The neoliberals originally, before they start lying about their actual origins, reject this principle and come to believe that in fact, a strong state is necessary to ensure that markets work. So now you have neoliberalism as a thing, but nothing really happens much until after World War II, because during World War II,

almost everyone is just doing state economic planning. And so, you know, all of these people rambling off to the side about how, oh, the market is the most efficient way to plan a system. Nobody listens to them because they're fighting a war and the way you fight wars is doing state planning. And after World War II, the situation for neoliberals is even worse because having you know gone through the experience of entire societies turning their entire economies and systems into planning agencies in order to you know mobilize a total war effort people after the war come back and go oh hey we can do this to other parts of the economy so this means that everyone and this is not just

the communist states this is you know this is brit, is doing Keynesianism, they're doing planning, they're doing state welfare programs, and the New Deal is spreading also across the globe. Now, in response to all of this, Hayek and his allies do two things. The first is found the Chicago School of Economics. And the second is to assemble the Avengers of Taking Food from Children, the Montpelion Society. The Montpelion Society is the central neoliberal institution, which is a weird thing because in a lot of ways, it's essentially just a closeted debate society intended to allow neoliberals to work out their political principles behind closed doors. Now, at this first meeting in 1947, a lot of the people from the

Lippmann Colloquium are there, but unfortunately some of the French members of the Colloquium and some of the people from Germany had collaborated with the Nazis, so they were out, and this meant that Hayek had to find new people to bring in. And the Montpellier Society's first meeting is the first time you actually have all three major schools of neoliberal thought in the same place at the same time arguing with each other and they can't agree on shit the only thing they can actually agree on is to look into more stuff and to get a sense of how far away from modern neoliberalism the arguments that are being had at the Montpellion Society are. The Montpellion Society has only ever once actually released a single statement

stating its principles. And this statement was the only thing that could be agreed on at the first meeting of the Montpellion Society. And I'm just going to read it. This is what they agreed to research. One, the analysis and explanation of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential moral and economic origins. 2. The redefinition of the state's functions so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian and liberal order. 3. Methods of re-establishing the rule of law and assuring its development so that individuals and groups are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private property rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power. 4. The possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market. 5. Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to liberty. Six, the problem of

creating an international order conductive to safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations. You know, just by looking at this, you can immediately see signs of how far things are going to move. I mean, you know, one of the things that they're talking about is, again, they're trying to research whether or not it's possible to just give people things without the market. And it's not just the sort of left quote-unquote wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this. Hayek, in probably his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, I mean, explicitly says, yeah, you should just give people food and housing and stuff outside of the market. give people food and housing and stuff outside of the market. And, you know, like today, if literally anyone who says this will be accused of socialism, this is the neoliberal, this is, a large part of the neoliberal position in 1947. Now, I've mentioned briefly that there are three

schools of neoliberalism, and we're going to spend some time looking at them because people have a tendency to look at neoliberalism and assume that, it's it's it's just the chicago school of economics you know which is the neoclassical school's most famous member is milton friedman and it's true that the chicago school are neoliberals but and and this is critical there's other intellectual schools involved in here and it's not just it's not just economists. Neoliberalism from the beginning is a multidisciplinary international project. You have lawyers, you have political scientists, you have journalists, you have philosophers, you have anthropologists. And the product of this is an ideology and a philosophy that is much deeper, much richer,

and much more dangerous than just Chicago school school alone the second of the major schools is the austrian school which is led by ludwig von mises and hayek and maybe most importantly but least well known the third school that we're actually going to be talking about today is the german autoliberals led by alexander rusto who again invented determinist liberalism and wilhelm ropke who almost no one has ever heard of but are incredibly important and i'm gonna i'm gonna insert a disclaimer here before i get yelled at by by nerds yes i'm aware of the public choice theorists at the virginia school i am also aware of a group of the neoliberalists called the geneva school even

though they're just regular or the liberals and there's also the rump of the neo-institutionalists um i don't care about them because they're not relevant to this story please do not yell at me on twitter now these people have wildly divergent beliefs and so i'm gonna do my best to do one sentence summaries of what these people believe so the chicago school of neoclassical economics humans are all knowing calculating gods, rationally optimizing their behavior to get the most out of every single interaction they engage in to maximize the utility, the product of this infinite freedom to choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian School. Humans are pig-ignorant fucks who know literally nothing and therefore

must be made to bow down to the ever-changing disequilibrium of the market, which is the only thing that can actually process information. Ordo-liberalism. The markets won't create or balance itself because these uncultured proletarian swine keep asking for raises instead of focusing on the magic of the family, so we have to use the state and laws to force people and companies to do competition. And these are obviously somewhat comical summaries of it, but these are very, very different conceptions of what it is to be a human, of whether the market occurs naturally or not, of what the market actually is.

Is it a product? Is it an object in and of itself? Is it a product? Is it just an inevitable product of humans doing whatever humans do? And this is part of the reason why it was almost impossible to get the original neoliberal secret on anything. But this is actually one of the strengths of the neoliberal project. The project only works because it uses the products of all three branches. You have neoclassical attacks on the welfare state austrian attacks on central planning and order liberal theories of the state and sort of cultural and non-economic nature of markets and you know when one school essentially

fails as an explanation for something they can jump to another school and this gives them a very wide range of abilities and move between crises and move between people attacking any of the individual schools because they can simply pull out another set of theories. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter Nocturnal

Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about each of the schools, and we're going to start with the Chicago School because, again, it's the most famous. And because I think there's another very interesting story here into how the Chicago School changed from its origins. So one of the people who was supposed to be a founding member of the Chicago School was a man named Henry Simmons. And Simmons is unlike the rest of the Chicago school because he actually believes in things. So I'm going to read a couple of quotes from him.

Thus, the great enemy of democracy is monopoly in all its forms. Gigantic corporate trade associations and other agencies of price control, trade unions, or in general, organization and concentration of power within functional classes. Here's another one. A monopolist is an implicit thief because his possession of market power leads to the exchange of commodities at prices that do not reflect underlying social scarcities. And, you know, you can see this sort of one of the classic neoliberal arguments, which is that, okay, so you have the market, the market is efficient, and trade unions get in the way of the market because they're a monopoly. But Simmons has what kind of looks like, from our perspective, a left-wing critique of monopolies, which is, yeah, okay, giant corporate monopolies are thieves because they use their market power to rob people by charging higher prices.

and it's it's i genuinely can't say how differently things would have gone if simmons had actually been around to see the chicago school through because he commits suicide in 1946 and unlike every single other person who was going to be involved with the chicago school from the beginning until now simmons had a genuine commitment to democracy and anti-monopoly principles. But unfortunately, he dies in 1946. And by the time the Chicago School was really up and running in the 50s, almost everyone involved in it is overtly pro-monopoly, pro-corporation, and they set up an antitrust school. But the thing that the antitrust school is arguing is that monopolies are actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care of everything. And if you try to stop monopolies from happening it will interfere

in the economy now this is this is the line that milton friedman takes and it's also the line of the volcker fund who are a sort of i guess you could call them a charitable organization but it's basically a billionaire slush funds that funds the school and they'd had real fights with simmons because simmons is like well okay monopolies are bad and volker is like well we're a monopoly so you guys need to actually work for us and by the time friedman essentially takes over the chicago school and uh knight take it over they're not just intellectual mercenaries they're extremely proud of the fact that they are in fact pure intellectual mercenary hacks with absolutely dogshit economics if you've ever read just a or you know if you've ever been forced to take an economics class you took microeconomics that's basically just what

chicago school believes it's everyone's a rational actor every every human being spends all of their time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply and demand. Markets are perfectly efficient if you just let them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state does interferes with the markets, etc., etc. This is the thing that is sort of classically understood to be neoliberalism's core content. But it's extremely important to understand that these are not the only neoliberals. And in fact, not only are these not the only neoliberals, this set of political principles, to a large extent, is not what the neoliberals actually believe. This kind of stuff is essentially what they feed the roots. Small states, taxes bad,

regulation bad. Everything is a market and has always been a market, and all human interactions will inevitably produce markets. But to understand what neoliberals actually believe, we need to talk about the order liberals. Now, the two most important order liberals are Wilhelm Röpke and W. W. Rüstow, who were both exiles from the Nazi regime. Now, a lot of the other order liberals who stayed in Nazi Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime. Now, a lot of the other order liberals who stayed in Nazi Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's kind of just overlooked and brushed to the side when people write about them. But Röpke and Rousseau's status as people who fled the Nazis gives them a kind of social cachet that their colleagues don't have, they become extremely important. Now, in some ways, the order liberals could be considered the left wing of the neoliberals.

They are significantly less harsh on the welfare state than other forms of neoliberalism. And this is in large part because the order liberals are the first neoliberals to ever actually hold any power. And I think most people tend to think that the first time neoliberalism was ever implemented was chile but that's not really true the order liberals are actually very powerful in in 1950s germany now the problem they face is that the left is powerful enough in 1950s germany that they cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare state so their solution is to create this thing called the social market and the order liberals get accused of like being crypto socialists by a lot of the other neoliberals but that's not really what's going on the very important thing about the order liberals

is that unlike the chicago school they're not economists both rope k and rusto are social scientists russo's a sociologist and they argue that the state and the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society produces dislocation. It produces atomization. It destroys social cohesion. And this means that you need a social, political, and sort of cultural framework to maintain it. cultural framework to maintain it. And their major focus is on providing stability and security for the working class and a new sense of identity and cultural cohesion. Because I think if the working class is essentially left to itself, it will create massification, cultural decay, and eventually the working class will turn into the proletariat, and that will give either communism or fascism. The order liberals believe that there's a kind of natural hierarchical order that they're trying to preserve. This is essentially what ordo means. It means literally order, which accords with the essence of humans. This means an order in which proportion, measure, and balance exist.

Now, they have a few ways that they're going to do this. Ropke is obsessed with something called structural policy. And structural policy is basically the argument that the conditions for markets have to be specifically created. And again, they're not just economic positions, they're social conditions. which is essentially about the power of anthropological and human aspects of culture and politics that are beyond the forces of production that they think are vital to the functioning of society. And part of what they're doing here is that they want to give people a cultural thing to focus on, so they stop talking about wages and welfare and who owns production. But the combination of vitalpolitik and structural policy gets you order liberalism. So nominally, they focus on individuals, but really what they're focusing on as the family, as this quote-unquote decentralized engine of economic capitalism, with small businesses and

hopefully small family farms as a sort of apolitical social support base for capitalism, which they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of the sort of industrial proletariat. which they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of the sort of industrial proletariat. And this sort of middle class that they're aspiring to build is extremely important for a number of reasons. Partially as a way to diffuse working class tension, partially as a way to sort of offer workers something to aspire to, and partly as a way to fuse the sort of traditional natural hierarchy with conceptions of meritocracy. natural hierarchy with conceptions of meritocracy. Now, Roebke in particular also begins to look for systems outside of just the democratic state to sort of create this legal apparatus that the neoliberals want to use to impose markets. And this is extremely important because a lot of where neoliberalism winds up coming from is not from national

governments. It's from this sort of international bureaucracy. It's from the IMF. It's from the World Bank. It's from the World Trade Organization. And those groups are controlled by neoliberal lawyers. And Roebke is the person who essentially first has this idea. Now, the goal of using these international legal institutions as a way of creating the laws to sort of enforce neoliberalism is using it as a way to sort of get around democracy. And I'm going to read this quote from Roque because, oh boy, does he absolutely not believe in freedom and democracy in the way that he and everyone else talks about publicly. It is possible that in my opinion of the strong state, I am even more fascist than you yourself, because I would indeed like to see all economic policy decisions concentrated in the hand of a fully independent and vigorous state weakened by no pluralist authorities of a corporatist kind. I see the strength of the state in the intensity,

not extensiveness, of its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of such a state should be designed is a question in and of itself for which I have no patent receipt to offer. I share your opinion that the old formulas of parliamentary democracy have proven themselves useless. People must get used to the fact that there is also a presidential authoritarian, even, yes, horrible thing to say, dictatorial democracy. So what he's saying there is that he's sending a letter to one of his friends and he's going, yeah, I'm even more fascist than you are. I think that democracy is actually a threat to the market and that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy democracy we should in fact concentrate all economic decision-making power in a in in the hands of a narrow elite in a strong

state which is you know the opposite of everything that neoliberals open the claim to be supporting but behind closed doors and we will get into more of this in a second this is what they actually believe now grope k is somewhat unique among neoliberals in that he is racist by neoliberal standards. He's just enormously, incredibly racist. So, for example, he's a massive apartheid dude. And again, I need to point this out. Ropke is one of the most important neoliberals.

He's one of the founding members of the Montpelieran society, although he gets kicked out for... Well, he eventually leaves because of some disputes he has with Hayek. But, you know, I'm going to read some of the things that he says about South Africa because they're horrible. Quote, the South African Negro is not only a man of an utterly different race, but at the same time stems from a completely different type and level of civilization he also calls ending apartheid quote national suicide and you know so he starts saying this stuff and the other neoliberals are like dude what the fuck so the neoliberal he used newspaper like he wrote for for 30 years was just like what and published a bunch of students going stop this this is you cannot seriously be supporting apartheid like

this and his response in these papers called the nzz and his response is quote these nzz intellectuals will not be satisfied until they let a real cannibal speak now rope k is one of his friends another mps member named hunnold so hayek looks at rope k support for apartheid and is like what the fuck like no absolutely not like this is horrible why are you doing this you know to Hayek's credit that this is the extent of the credit

I will give Hayek in this episode is that he looks at just the open overt racism of Ropeke and is like no and when he does this Ropeke's friend Honnold says that hyatt quote now advocates one man one vote in race mixing now you can see a lot of things here about okay that are extremely scary and one of those things is that the the language that he's speaking this uh the west is committing national suicide uh the clash of civilizations race war stuff you know this is this is essentially the the i mean literally the national suicide thing

is what white nationalists say today and rope k is in a lot of ways a right nationalist he's just sort of a german one but what's what's really scary about ropeque is that he's not sort of bound by by the sort of strictures of of a neoclassical neoclassical economist so for example he won't propose that like the dating market like like dating should be on market and that rich like men should be able to like i i go on an app and like like every every every single time a person gets into a relationship, it should just be entirely based on market exchange and stuff like that. Because he doesn't think like an economist. He thinks about cultural factors. He thinks about sort of social factors.

But he also – he's cracked the code for how neoliberalism is going to be implemented. The way you do neoliberalism is neoliberalism plus racism. neoliberalism is going to be implemented the way you do neoliberalism is neoliberalism plus racism and he realizes that you you need it you know neoliberalism's actual sort of policies right will cause atomization will cause social dislocation will cause the the existing social structures of society sort of implode and he realizes that in order to get this to work you need you need a spiritual base you need some kind of new thing that you can use to to sort of bring all these people together and he picks catholicism which doesn't work because i mean there's a number of reasons for this but you know partially it's too early partially it's because he picks catholicism

not evangelicalism but this is how the neoliberals are eventually going to take power by you know aligning themselves with the evangelicals who promise to solve the atomization they're creating with you know religion and family and the patriarchy and he figures this out in like the 60s but it's just you know like 20 years before the rest of the neoliberals figured it out. Now, there's the, he also, Rupke has like a bunch of very similar stuff that he thinks about this, about Rhodesia, but interestingly, he has more support for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his positions on South Africa. And now I'm going to, we're going to jump back to Chicago school. We're going to read some Milton Friedman stuff about Rhodesia because dear God, quote, majority rule for Rhodesia today is a euphemism

for a black minority government, which would almost surely mean both the eviction or exodus of most of the whites and also a drastically lower living level and opportunity for the black masses of Rhodesia. Here's another one where he's describing the system of one person one vote quote a system of highly weighted voting in which special interest a far greater role to play than does the general interest you know so that's a description of what democracy is uh in contrast he thinks the market economy is quote a system of effective proportional representation. Now, Friedman also thinks that, you know, so there's a blockade, like an economic blockade of Rhodesia going on because they're Rhodesia and they are maybe the worst people ever. That's probably it. Only a mild exaggeration, yeah.

It's just, you know, absolutely fanatical like white supremacist government and friedman also calls the isolation of rhodesia quote the suicide of the west and you know he's doing this on racial lines but he's also doing this along the lines of this argument that democracy itself is actually bad and this is the place that he can express it because you know he can leverage racism to get away with it and i'm gonna read another friedman quote because i i think it's it's important to understand what the neoliberals actually think about democracy quote this was sometimes admitted by members of mount pelion in public but only when Quote, You'll find it hard to find anybody who will say that 55% of the people believe the other 45% of the people should be shot. That's an appropriate exercise of democracy. What I believe is not a democracy, but an individual freedom in a society in which individuals cooperate with one another. a kind of anarchist argument against democracy, which is that, like, yeah, okay, so if you interpret democracy as pre-majority rule, then a majority

can just do a terrible thing to the minority. But, you know, what the neoliberals actually mean by this is that 55% of the population could, for example, I don't know, take money from the rich small part of the population and distribute it around, and they think that is

totalitarianism. And in order to stop that from happening, they are, in fact,ism and in order to stop that from happening they are in fact absolutely and perfectly willing to just back dictatorships and you know that's in essence what they what they what they actually want is a state the sole function of which essentially is to ensure that nobody ever does this and you know if you can do this inside of a democratic framework fine but if you can't well i don't know it's time for a coup welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. rushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. like as a libertarian as a person who sort of believes in spontaneous order and like thinks that i i you should you should only have sort of small decentralized political institutions uh and so we're gonna watch hayek quote a bunch of stuff from and agree with a bunch of stuff from carl schmidt which is again incredible because Hayek elsewhere described Schmitt as, quote, the Nazis' chief jurist, which is true. But here are some other things that Hayek has said about Carl Schmitt. Quote, the weakness of the government of an omnipotent democracy was very clearly seen by the extraordinary German student of politics, Carl Schmittmidt who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing form of government better than most people and you know hayek believes a lot of the same things that schmidt does so you know one of them the things that

schmidt is like big on is that liberalism and democracy are opposite things and hayek also believes this and okay so i'm gonna read i'm gonna read some schmidt and i'm gonna read some hayek and they're gonna be saying the same thing so here's schmidt only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free market only a strong state can generate genuine decentralization and bring about free and autonomous domains here's hayek if we proceed on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom. So what Hayek, yeah, Schmidt is saying

that only a strong state can support a free market and do decentralization. Hayek is saying if you let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it will create unfreedom. Now, we will get into this more when we talk about Chile, because oh boy, is there some other shit that Hayek has to do with that. But most neoliberals hate democracy no matter what they say in public. And this is the other important thing here. Neoliberals lie. They lie constantly. They lie to the point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes almost impossible, and even their intellectual enemies believe the lies that they tell. What most people think the neoliberals believe is that, you know, they want a small government to the groups what they actually want is a large and powerful surveillance and legal state in a massive

bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro-corporate policies at gunpoint um i'm i'm gonna read close out this episode by by reading a list of things that philip marowski is an economic historian who studies neoliberalism whose work i've used used a lot for these episodes, wrote about the sort of 11 principles of what neoliberals actually believe. One, free markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through political organizing. Two, the market is an information processor and the most efficient one possible, more efficient than any government or any single human being could be. Truth can only be validated by the market. 3. Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of humankind. The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of it, and to redefine its structure and function in order to create and maintain the market-friendly culture. in order to create and maintain the market-friendly culture. 5. There is no contradiction between public politics, citizen, and private market entrepreneur-consumer because the latter does and should eclipse the former.

6. The most important virtue, more important than justice or anything else, is freedom, defined negatively as freedom to choose, most importantly defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of the market. Seven, capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders. Eight, inequality of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights is a good thing. It promotes productivity because people envy the rich and emulate them. People who complain about inequality are either sore looters or old foggies who need to get hip to the way things work nowadays. Nine, corporations can do no wrong. By definition, competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency monopoly. 10. The market, engineered and promoted

by neoliberal experts, can always provide a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by the market in the first place. There's always an app for that. 11. There's no difference between is and should be. Free markets both should be, normatively, and are, positively, the most efficient economic system, and the most just way of doing politics, and the most empirically true description of human behavior, and the most ethical and moral way to live, which in turn explains and justifies why there are versions of free markets should be and, as neoliberals build more and more power increasingly are universal yeah we've read a long list of things but essentially the point of this is that neoliberals want to transform everything into the market because they think the market is a more efficient way of doing things a better and more moral and more just way of doing things than anything else you could possibly imagine, including things like democracy. And any problem the system produces

will be solved by the system. Now, this is an incredibly radical political program in a lot of ways, in that, well, you can argue whether it's a radical or reactionary program. I mean, I think it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways, but it is a program that is vastly different. I mean, I think, I think it's a, it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways, but it is a, is a program that is vastly different than anything else that has come before it.

Now the challenge of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this. And the answer is that it's really hard to, it is extremely hard to convince people that, you know, everyone should bow down to the market, et cetera, et cetera.

And so the, the only way they can actually do this is by lying. Now, as Mirowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated intellectual and political network that forms a sort of Petroitska doll with Montpelier-owned society at its center and an ever-expanding group of more and less specialized think tanks as the shell layers. So in this way, they mirror the vanguard structure and sort of front group networks of their communist opponents, but they have significantly better financial backing. And this means that, you know, they can run the American Enterprise Institute

and, you know, with copious amounts of coke money, they can run this entire enormous network of think tanks that allow them to sort of act as a government in waiting. And the other thing that they're going to attempt to do is take over the global regulatory bureaucracy, the IMF, the World Bank, eventually the World Trade Organizations, and force people to do this at gunpoint

by using those organizations. Now, all they needed was a crisis that they could use to implement their policies. And next week, we're going to look at the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted. This has been It Could Happen Here. Find us on Instagram and on Twitter at HappenHerePod. Find the rest of our stuff at CoolZone. And goodbye. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.